Review: Snapshot

Snapshot by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A nice viewpoint of the whole groundhog day / edge of tomorrow type genre - reliving the same thing again and again from every angle until you figure it out. A very fine line to walk because it's not actually infinite and blundering around will alert people with better awareness / knowledge than you, but satisfyingly well-crafted.

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Review: The Severed Streets

The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Started slow but turned out really well. Brilliantly off-kilter and Neil Gaiman was a bizarre outtake integrated really well. Brilliant finish.

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Review: A Memory of Light

A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wait, this is getting a little too metaphysical... and there's a lot of new characters to keep track of. Who was the real enemy then?

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Review: The Gathering Storm

The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Brandon Sanderson ones are definitely getting more action-packed.

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Review: The Queen of Attolia

The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not as good as the first, but still pretty good. Would continue.

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Review: The Thief

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was nice. It starts well, gets better, and has just the perfect balance of intrigue and a very well-written, first-person perspective that conceals as much as it reveals brilliantly.

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Review: Emperor of Thorns

Emperor of Thorns by Mark Lawrence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a good ending. Jorg was very unlikeable earlier, but he seems to have gotten a lot better now. The world also starts making a lot more sense now that we know where it fits in; you can even sympathize with him sometimes, and understand the inexorable arc of history that made him who he was and made him who he would become.
It's very dark, hard to keep track of and contains a lot of unnecessary fluff, but it's a good tale.

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Review: United States of Japan

United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I really wanted to like this but just couldn't. It was too close to Man in the High Castle, and had all the problems and none of the plus points. It was tedious, long drawn out, and unnecessarily brutal in the wrong places and times. There were too many convenient coincidences. The characters were unpleasant and forgettable, and for the few that weren't, inconsistent.
Give this a miss.

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Review: Fantastic Voyage

Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's classic golden age scifi, almost endearing in it's earnestness, slightly (and unintentionally) offensive tropes and attitudes that mark it as a product of a bygone age - but still a brilliantly imaginative journey, a standalone story that established so many clear rules and boundaries for itself so fast it was completely believable.


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Review: Blackfish City

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Blackfish City lives in a Paolo Bacigalupi dystopia with almost William Gibson-level touches, a Sense8 set of parallel plotlines on a Snow Crash Raft setting.
If that sounds like a lot, it is - but it's still very readable, fast, engaging, and empathizable. At times it's dark, violent, and bleak, but it ends well and still leaves you with a future you'd want to look forward to.

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Review: 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Some books are so seminal, so genre-defining, that you really can't review them.
Just read it.

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Review: The Wasp Factory

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Imagine you're in a train, in the very last coach, speeding through the countryside when you first feel it - a little tremor, as imagined as felt... then the noise and the shockwave hits, and you're flying forward, down the corridor and through the vestibules, slowly drifting through coach after coach, through scenes of startlement, fear, panic, violence, gradually escalating destruction and gore as you move towards the impact point of the collision...
The story the Wasp Factory builds just like this, feeling almost like a dark version of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, progressing into a cataclysmic horror perfectly set up by, and contrasted with, the idyll and creeping darkness of all that came before.
It's not a Culture novel, so no AI swarms of nanomachine killers as I first thought, but this is a very good break from the long line of depressing medieval fantasy I had got stuck in. And if you seek out horror-drama, you couldn't do too much better than this.

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Review: The Hammer of God

The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's interesting how hard sci can be so minimalist - one concept, one plot, one idea - and one short story. But it comes up with a feel that Armageddon and Deep Impact completely lost, and despite the million-dollar budget, leaves you thinking a lot longer and harder.

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Review: Age of Myth

Age of Myth by Michael J. Sullivan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty decent. There's a slow burn, memorable characters, and an explosive end. A lot of plotlines. Excellent worldbuilding. A sense of the epic along with daily human drama. Good magic. Sometimes a bit slow but definitely unputdownable.

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Review: The Wasp Factory

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Imagine you're in a train, in the very last coach, speeding through the countryside when you first feel it - a little tremor, as imagined as felt... then the noise and the shockwave hits, and you're flying forward, down the corridor and through the vestibules, slowly drifting through coach after coach, through scenes of startlement, fear, panic, violence, gradually escalating destruction and gore as you move towards the impact point of the collision...
The story the Wasp Factory builds just like this, feeling almost like a dark version of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, progressing into a cataclysmic horror perfectly set up by, and contrasted with, the idyll and creeping darkness of all that came before.
It's not a Culture novel, so no AI swarms of nanomachine killers as I first thought, but this is a very good break from the long line of depressing medieval fantasy I had got stuck in. And if you seek out horror-drama, you couldn't do too much better than this.

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Review: King of Thorns

King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

King of Thorns is a very interesting and well-crafted combination of the sense of Blood Meridian into a fairly standard medieval fantasy setting, then throws in a fascinating backstory, good tactics, zombies, Freddy-level nightmare horror, blood and gore, black humor, gripping drama, and some really good writing that keeps what would have been fundamentally evil and unpleasant characters likeable and what would have been fundamentally good traditional and non-traditional protagonists and goals, the wrong option.
It turns a lot of things around on their heads - and is all the better for it.

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Review: The Fandom

The Fandom by Anna Day
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It was pretty good. A Hunger Games lookalike with a very interesting premise - if a fandom's belief is enough to create a world, but limits it to a Groundhog-day existence within the confines of a storyline, what do the inhabitants of that world do to escape?
That premise alone - looking out from neverending Narnia - is brilliant enough; the rest is fairly standard fare, or seems like it for a while until it gets a little twist.
Some nods to other relatively unknown classics, but overall pretty good.

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Review: Grey Sister

Grey Sister by Mark Lawrence
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

And it continues, and gets even better.

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Review: Red Sister

Red Sister by Mark Lawrence
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, here's a delightful new twist.
Mallory Towers with magic, murder, and myth.
It would have been a good girl's-school book on it's own.
It would have been a pretty decent dark Harry Potter.
It would have been a pretty good roguelike slumrat orphan revenge tale.
There's even a decent sci-fi angle that feels way bigger than the story.
But there's also a fantastic new system of magic, awesome characters, tense pace, and rich, sprawling, deep story that's nothing short of brilliant.

Would I read more? Can't wait.

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Review: The Core

The Core by Peter V. Brett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The CoreThe Core gets the series back on track and ends it with a bang. The previous versions were struggling like crazy with what felt like hundreds of side characters taking on life of their own and eating footage like there was no tomorrow till the point it had become impossible to track who was where doing what and related to who. They're all still there, but now there's a set of separate timelines that end, bringing a sense of clarity and closure, and the original team is back in the epic arc that ends with the kind of awesome struggle we had been waiting for all this while, Major channeling of LOTR's Mines of Moria happening here, and a really really awesome dad-level joke towards the end that settles the 'Who is the real Deliverer' question once and for all with no coming back.
This was a good series. Glad I stayed with it.

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Review: Nightwise

Nightwise by R.S. Belcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nightwise is so Constantine it's hilarious. I can't imagine how RS Belcher forgot the trenchcoat, unless Jim Butcher had already appropriated it for Harry... either way, you end up with a prose version of John C. who out-Constantines Constantine, with added blood and gore and bites of reality and plot points that I honestly can't pinpoint but know have come up sooner or later in some Hellblazer: HauntedHellblazer series.
And it is still fantastic. You don't expect it to be, given the above, but it's really good, fast, readable, and a protagonist that skims just this close to being an actual villain and still remains empathetic, identifiable-with.
Why not that last star? The ending felt... off. Incomplete. Unsatisfying. There should have been more, somehow, more action, more drama, more... things. Given all that came before to get here, it was not up to the bar set earlier.

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Review: The Engines of God

The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one was interesting because it's different from a lot of the standard stuff. There are still world-destroying godlike entities and action sequences and spaceships and killer crabs, but there's also a lot of human elements, dysfunctional and damaged people in redemption arcs, and a very nicely-modulated slow-pace archaeological approach to problem solving that's very new.
It's Indiana Jones in space, if Indiana Jones ever started acting like an actual archaeologist.

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Review: The Republic of Thieves

The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There are some books you can just immediately recognize are the result of a bunch of research notes leftover from the earlier good novels.
I just could not get to relate to this. The situation was off - funny, but ultimately feeling very pointless. There seemed to be something about this story - this specific situation - that seems to have some subconscious significance for Scott Lynch, but honestly, it's not come through... so there's a kind of frustration and bemusement that colors the entire reading experience.
And the mages... were better when unrevealed. This lot is seriously disappointing.

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Review: Sympathy for the Devil

Sympathy for the Devil by Tim Pratt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some of the stories were good. Some were viscerally terrific. Some were meh. And a couple were 'what the F is going on' in ways both good and bad.
Is it worth a read?
Sure, because with this kind of diversity you're sure to find at least one you really, really like.

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Review: Heaven's Queen

Heaven's Queen by Rachel Bach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ends with a bang. The series is actually a lot better as a series, not a one-off. There's a bit of a deus ex machina thrown in to make everything wrap up nicely but it doesn't grate... and there's an excellent little plot twist that, in my opinion, just fell a little short of going far enough to be a really great plotline.
But... it was a good read.

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Review: Honor's Knight

Honor's Knight by Rachel Bach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It gets better. Boy, does it get better.
Complexity increases, it reads more and more like a good TV series, and Deviana starts getting a little bit more interesting. There's still a lot of exposition and hand-wringing but it starts falling into place better and better, still with a lot of classic TV sci fi tropes but put together in a much more interesting way than you'd expect.

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Review: Crooked Kingdom

Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It continues. I sometimes seems to get a bit... slower? But that's just the classic fantasy story paradigm holdover. Take it as a story of a gang of thieves, and it holds up brilliantly, in the league of Caine Black Knife or Locke Lamora.
Definitely unmissable if you recognize the last two names.

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Review: Six of Crows

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pretty awesome. Easy to get lost in the fantasy element of a magic world, especially after the mage wars of the Grisha trilogy, but the Crows saga is a rogue story through and through.
And what a story, and characters, they are!

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Review: Assassin's Apprentice

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

'Assassin' is a very interesting set of job skills bound up in a single word. It's a person who is a social strategist, economist, historian, tactical psychologist, poisoner, stealth master, messenger, codebreaker, confidante... the role requires a particularly unique, hard-to-find set of abilities and training, and gets deployed in even more unique, pivotal places, the tipping points of history, in a way that nobody should ever know of.
This book does a specially masterful job of rolling them all up into a single novel. It's brilliant.
And there's zombies, telepaths, barbarian princesses, wargs, and sorcerer-pirates.

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Review: Age of Swords

Age of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The best part of this story takes place in the climax-side epic underdark dungeon crawl - there's just something about vast deserted subterranean cities inhabited by Things of the Dark that is really good and feels fresh, despite LOTR and The Carpet People, and this falls somewhere between the two. You have to slightly stretch the disbelief to allow for afew thousand years of innovation and discovery to be done by a single person in a week, but it's pretty well handled. The parallel storyline has it's conclusion without ever interacting with the main, so all set up for the next one in the series.

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Review: Age of Swords

Age of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The best part of this story takes place in the climax-side epic underdark dungeon crawl - there's just something about vast deserted subterranean cities inhabited by Things of the Dark that is really good and feels fresh, despite LOTR and The Carpet People, and this falls somewhere between the two. You have to slightly stretch the disbelief to allow for afew thousand years of innovation and discovery to be done by a single person in a week, but it's pretty well handled. The parallel storyline has it's conclusion without ever interacting with the main, so all set up for the next one in the series.

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Review: All Systems Red

All Systems Red by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Surprisingly intense, easy to get into, fun, and fast-paced, this short book hits all the right notes, pulls you in quickly, and keeps you invested. Expected something different, but was pleasantly surprised by what I got instead.

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